John le Carré, a Spy Haunted By Birds

David Cornwell aka “John le Carré’ and his dog.

The spy master Maxwell Knight who was known as “M,” was an enthusiastic naturalist with a house packed with wild animals, and who wrote many books about the same, even as he appeared on BBC Radio as “Uncle Max”.

At some point Knight needed an illustrator for his new book, Animals and Ourselves, and he turned to a talented young man and fellow MI5 and MI6 agent by the name of David Cornwell for his art needs.

David Cornwell later became famous under his pen name — “John le Carré’.

Young David Cornwell was the son of Reggie Cornwell, a gambler, insurance conman, and an associated of the notorious Kray Twins who terrorized and controlled London crime in the 1960s.

It was on a gambling trip to Monte Carlo that young David was faced with an image that seems, by his own admission, to have shaped his life.  In his autobiography, entitled The Pigeon Tunnel, le Carré’ (aka David Cornwell) writes:

There is scarcely a book of mine that didn’t have The Pigeon Tunnel at some time or another as its working title. Its origin is easily explained. I was in my mid-teens when my father decided to take me on one of his gambling sprees to Monte Carlo. Close by the old casino stood the sporting club, and at its base lay a stretch of lawn and a shooting range looking out to sea. Under the lawn ran small, parallel tunnels that emerged in a row at the sea’s edge. Into them were inserted live pigeons that had been hatched and trapped on the casino roof. Their job was to flutter their way along the pitch-dark tunnel until they emerged in the Mediterranean sky as targets for well-lunched sporting gentlemen who were standing or lying in wait with their shotguns. Pigeons who were missed or merely winged then did what pigeons do. They returned to the place of their birth on the casino roof, where the same traps awaited them.

Quite why this image has haunted me for so long is something the reader is perhaps better able to judge than I am.

 

As a novelist, John John le Carré coined intelligence jargon that was so convincing it was actually adopted in the field.  Among the terms credited to le Carré:

• Mole
• Lamplighters
• Honey trap
• Pavement artists
• Come in from the cold
• The Cousins
• The Circus
• Scalphunters

In 1964, David Cornwell's career as an intelligence officer came to an end as the result of the betrayal of British agents' covers to the KGB by Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent who was one of the Cambridge Five.

The novelist died on December 12, 2020, aged 89.